Modified Social Benches Transform Traditional Public Seating

We are all familiar with the public bench as a conventional type – some horizontal slats for sitting on, some more for leaning against, and four legs to hold up all of the above.

Jeppe Hein takes this convention and adds a series of twists, turns and inversions to create something new and interactive that plays on our sense of the familiar as well as our curiosity about the exotic.

Some encourage playful interaction from children, while others encourage people to sit and face one another, communicating rather than sitting in silent parallel. Still others are changed around apparently just for fun, or to let people take a nap in public – something normally prohibited and actively designed against when it comes to city benches. What the disparate pieces share is a childlike intuition that little changes can make a big difference in the urban landscape.